Hullo! Just a quick note or two before we begin.

This story has four parts. I always intended it to be short. The first draft was very rough and since the dreams I based it on are very old, it's taken this long to recompose.

This isn't based on the Pilot. It's more of a modern AU mixup, where you don't see any ninjas, but nobody's saying they didn't exist.. The sort of 'modern' with not much technological advances except for a car and, well, you'll see. (I'm not saying they're good cars, but they are motorized transportation.)

Chapter One:
the world below

He makes it through the gates before they close, the guards eyeing him. Eyeing his long fingers, his sharp nails, his narrow face and eyes as natural a blue as the air above, but so thinly made. Almost .. unhuman, as if there should be slits, snake-like, where his pupils rest.

But Naruto looks human, and this is enough to let him cross, though the guards are wary and turn their heads to watch him pass. The gate is shut behind him, and anything else which might wander down off the mountain.

This great monument of rock and twisted, broken, menacing looking branches that seem alive in their contrasting greens and browns, almost a black so dark, so dark. This is what surrounds the village from three sides, the town built into the base of what, so wild, grew around it to try and swallow them whole.

From the south come visitors, tourists and clientele. From the north and east and west, nothing save the great walls built neary high enough to block the view of the summit.

But once, not as far away as fifty years, the beasts came down. Down off the mountain and into the town. And even now the shadows of their continued existance, though visible only in rumors and myths, seeps into the village like a shadow. A cloud of darkness that, rotten, fouls the air.

And Kakashi, like few in the village, remembers his father's warnings. At any time, he can recall the forages together, armed, through the roots of what grew so omnious. (Dark and foreboding.) His father's hand on his shoulder saying, "Son. Look for tracks. What we hunt is hungry and dangerous and should not be left alone."

And the monsters, the beastly demons so animal-like and so not, mostly eluded them. Except for once. The one day that - despite all of Kakashi's best reasonings why, he still couldn't explain - his father wandered off alone. Unarmed and into the great teeth of what was so carnivorous and untamed.

These days Kakashi spends most of his free time sitting in the local bar, holding his glass in one hand with his eyes always, always, on the window. Watching, and waiting.

So, when Sakura, one of his students - a girl with bright colors and bright potential who possibly listens the least to his warnings of danger. When she drags Naruto to him, half-collapsed, half-awake, and more stray-like than any begger child or orphan should be .. Kakashi is wary.

He is suspicious. But, most of all, he is wary.

Naruto doesn't know what to do with himself.

He has been running so long from contact, from humans. The mountain that was his home ill-preparing him. For wandering lost in the village of fleshly touch, all skin and caresses all around him, so casual it makes his heart ache. For overweight mortals, sticky children, stooped and wrinkled old, like burning paper, so much, so sudden that he stops.

In the middle of the street, overwhelmed by it all.

Until a crowd pushes by him, catching him and gathering him up in their midst. Moving, flowing into a grand building with tapestries, with pictures on the walls.

There is so much, there are so many, these mortals, these humans, that Naruto is remiss to resist.

It was either a brilliant plan or a very foolish idea, hiding here, in the ear of the cat, where no mouse would dare to go.

For Naruto is half-mortal himself, no cat or mouse, but part human. His humanity making him fear, and making him care deeply, filling him with love and the painful absence the lack of love brings.

For he has no mother, and no father. Only the scraps and leavings a pack of demons throws to the side. All his life he has been this, a dog at the table of greater masters, a mutt. All his life he has suffered their ridicule and scorn, and now he comes down.

Down off the mountain of monsters and beasts into the village. Into the world of humans, who are just as monsterous and beastlike, in their own ways.

For here, where only the wisest cat would think to look, the most foolhardy demon would dare to venture, Naruto ventures. For here, the humans might kill him if they knew what he was. Here, the demons would slaughter him if they dared where he had gone.

Here, in the village of humans beneath a mountaintop of demons, where Naruto is both and neither all at once so painful it hurts.

She is rosy cheeks and eyes so full a green it is as if he is back again, home, staring at the new growth poking up from the earth and underbrush. She is a girl-child, a human, her name is Sakura. And she walks behind him so obviously, pulling at the back of his shirt and wondering, outloud, about the strangeness of his clothes.

"You're not from around here," she muses, holding tight, her fingers around his arm, so curious so bright.

His words are clipped, his response slow and almost guttural as he tells her he followed the light of the moon here, to this place.

"That is so romantic!" She chirps, pulling him close, his arm pressed to her chest, almost a hug they are close. So close his shoulder presses into her. Despite the light, the warmth of the afternoon sun. Daytime.

She pulls him forward, to a seating which is more a fixture and pile of cushions than proper decorum. Asking, "Where are your parents, where are you going?" as she tugs him to space beside her.

"I.." he is startled by the questions, confused by her. She smiles at him, all open lips and shining teeth. And he thinks of terrible fanged jaws ripping into meat, mouths opening, bloody, as the red slips out like drool to growl at him.

But she seems kind, though her boldness, her touch, makes him flinch away from her. So he answers, an undercoat of something else rumbling through his throat, unconcious it's so natural. "I am .. alone. Where I am going? Where I am, I suppose."

And he sits beside her.

The man is named Minato, but he was the fourth son of a very well-loved couple - the only child to make it to adulthood - and so earns the title Yondaime, and the trust and compassion of the entire village.

He is strong, in more than just bones and blood, and keeps a solemn face beneath his constant good-will and cheer.

He has married young, and has three children who run to him, cry out for him and touch the hem of his garment when he leaves as if he is the shroud. As though he were something holy that should not have lasted this long.

Sakura was an only child, and is an only child still in that she is permitted rudelike behavior, coddled - by both her parents and her teachers - and maintains childish desires. To covet, to possess, to not share.

And she wants to keep Naruto all to herself, this interesting boy who comes with no family, no baggage or belongings, not knowing just where he's going or even why he's left.

He is shy, she thinks, looking so startled. She keeps him close to warm him, because she believes warmth is love. And love must make all things better. Be it the physical embrace of her arms around his tense forearm, or the emotional one of her bright smiles.

She thinks this is enough to reassure him, put him at ease, but he only grows considerably less so at every attempt. And so she pulls him closer, tries harder.

For if anyone needs a friend, surely it's this boy with the hair as bright as autumn wheat fields.

"You seem different," she says, his own breath his fear choking him, so sudden in his throat, how can she not hear, his heart is beating so loud.

"You're not like other boys.." Sakura's head tilts to watch him, she has been watching him, studying him.

'I am not human', Naruto wants to say, but the words stick on their way out and afterall, he thinks belatedly, isn't he in some way just that? Just as human as this bright girl sitting beside him, as soft as roses, as delicate and alive as the flowers themselves.

Maybe. Maybe who he is, what he is, what he can do, is actually more human than he had ever thought?

And so, he turns to her, and says, in his voice that is somehow more than a voice (animal-like in it's audacity), "I can command heat."

Her eyes widen, is she supposed to believe him, something like this? So ridiculous, so fanatical it seems impossible, like a fairytale come to life.

For who believes bedtime stories about monsters and nightmares but the very young and very old? And since she is neither, she laughs at him, amused, and tells him to prove it.

And how was he to know there was a central heating system in the damn building? How was he to know even what such a thing was, it was so warm out, there were so many people, the building inside was just as warm if not more so.

It should have been so easy, he'd done it before on hot nights sweating beneath pelt and fur, shoved against the wall. The demons, the beasts, growling and purring all around him until the rumble seeped through to his bones, was in him still.

Just take it back. Call back the warmth, the crackling desire that belongs only to the flame. Comb it and coil it all around, like water draining back to the soul. Use his body, his flesh and blood like a sponge, draw it back. Pull it all back, put it all deep inside, close to his heart, where nothing can break penetrate.

All-encompassing heat, the fire of living. This he turned, night after night, pressed against the back-most wall, out of the way, in a nest of demon-kind - his own kind, almost - into cold, unfeeling air. Cold that chilled and seeped into the bones.

Air conditioning.

How was he to know?

He slept under pelts, in caves and hollowed out burrows. He ate off the ground, fingers digging deep, tearing, ripping, just as hungry as the teeth, all nails and fangs, incisors just as sharp.

Just how was he supposed to know? His nails clenching, digging into the purple cushion of overstuffed fluff beneath as he fought the warmth, as he tugged and grabbed with something other than flesh, pulling this eternal possession, heat, deep inside where all that should have been left was goosebump-inducing frigid air.

And outside, the generator running, pumping harder and harder as Naruto, like a whirlpool in a stream, stole the living air away. Humming, thumping against the outside wall.

While inside, overwhelmed, the world just as hot against him, just as suffocating and warm, Naruto filled up like a tea kettle set to boil, and drawing it in, pulling at it still the harder, the faster, with Sakura beside him, laughing.

Nowhere to put it, nowhere to keep it until, like the tea, he boiled over. The exhaustion, the pressure and stress of it, an engine left running too long, still so warm around him, with nothing changed, nothing at all that he was thrown into unconciousness like a leaf swept up in the tide of his own making.

Passing out sideways into Sakura's startled lap.

".. indeed and truly you've chosen a bad place to be lame in .."
- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle.

It is not until the icicles have already formed on his eyelids that Sakura notices how cold it's suddenly gotten around them. She still doesn't want to believe him, but ten feet away people are still sweating and she can see the frost running up his fingertips from where they touch the seat beside him.

She does, however, notice him faint sideways into her lap.

.